London's Science Museum has begun work to underpin the creation of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a steam-powered prototype computer first imagined 170 years ago.

The Science Museum is to help digitise the original plans for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Only part of the machine (above) was completed as a trial model at the time of his death in 1871.Photo credit: Science Museum

On Wednesday, self-confessed "crazed Charles Babbage fan"
John Graham-Cumming announced the museum is in the
process of digitising Babbage's technical plans and notebooks, as a
step towards realising the Victorian mathematician's vision of
creating an Analytical
Engine. The machine is being researched and built by Plan 28, a charity being set up by Graham-Cumming and Doron Swade, the museum's curator of computing.

The general-purpose computer would have been programmable via
punched card, and would have conformed in several ways with the
computers that arose in the 20th century.

Graham-Cumming, author of The Geek Atlas and a campaigner
who elicited
a prime-ministerial apology for the discrimination suffered by
Alan Turing, wrote in a blog
post that the digitisation of Babbage's writings is needed to
"perform the vital academic study of the Analytical Engine as Babbage
imagined it".

"I am pleased to be able to say that the Science Museum agreed that
digitisation was vital and undertook this project," Graham-Cumming
wrote. "The work on digitisation started on Monday, September 12 and
early in October Doron and I will have access to the digitised versions of
Babbage's plans and notebooks for study."

Graham-Cumming said the Science Museum would make the digitisations
available to the general public sometime in 2012.

"Today, the Science
Museum doesn't have the resources to immediately make them available
to the general public," he wrote. "I know there are many readers who
would love to access these documents across the web, but the museum
needs just a little more time before they can cope with a flood of
enquiries."

Pioneering designs

Babbage's technical writings were bequeathed to the museum by his
son, Henry Prevost Babbage. The mathematician first described the
Analytical Engine in 1837, and refined his ideas until he died in
1871.

The mathematician's son used his father's designs to build the Babbage Analytical Engine Mill, intended to add, subtract, divide and multiply. Charles Babbage's Difference Engine has already been reconstructed, but that device was a calculator and not programmable.

The full Analytical Engine has never been built, and almost a century passed after
its conception before someone else made a general-purpose
computer.

The device would have included a type of memory, while pegs stuck into rotating barrels would have carried out the
instructions that today would be the responsibility of a CPU.
Babbage's description of the machine inspired Ada
Lovelace to come up with what many see as the world's first
computer programming.

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